Once again the household of Procurator Pontius Pilate was settled in the magnificent great Palace of the Herods; once again the ancient capital of Israel was teeming with countless Jews come up for the Feast of the Passover.

From every region and hamlet, almost from every home, in Judaea, Samaria, Peraea, and Galilee, from Antioch, Damascus, Tarsus, Alexandria, Memphis, and Cyrene, from Ephesus, Athens, and Corinth, from all provinces rimming the Great Sea, even to Rome and beyond, from the islands of Cyprus and Sardinia and Sicily and Crete and those numerous smaller ones dotting the Aegean, devout Israelites had swarmed into Jerusalem’s crowded narrow ways and squares before the gates.

Every Jewish home, whether pretentious stone residence crowning Mount Zion or squalid malodorous hovel burrowed beneath the city’s walls in noisome Ophel, was overflowing with pilgrim kinsmen returned for this greatest annual feast of Israel. For every person living in Jerusalem, Centurion Longinus casually estimated as he stood on Fortress Antonia’s balcony outside his chamber, perhaps ten pilgrims had squirmed themselves inside the walls of the old city. And countless other thousands had been unable to find living quarters within the walls. Throngs of Passover celebrants overflowed the slope downward to the Brook Kidron and up the eastern rise past Gethsemane to the summit of the Mount of Olives and as far as Bethany. To the south, beyond the ever smoldering fires of the refuse dumps in the Hinnom valley, and to the west, tents and brush arbors of Passover pilgrims dotted the untilled areas through which ran the Bethlehem road. Northward, too, though Longinus could not survey that section of Jerusalem and its environs because of the great tower at his back, and to his right over beyond the massive pile of the Palace of the Herods, for many furlongs past the Ephraim and Joppa Gates, thin curlings of grayish-white smoke spiraled upward from small fires over which Passover pilgrims were bending now in preparation of the evening meal.

Longinus had been quartered near the Centurion Cornelius, but he had hardly seen his friend. The night of Cornelius’ arrival from Galilee with the Tetrarch’s party and his three Zealot prisoners, they had talked briefly in the mess hall, but they were both weary from the traveling and soon retired to their beds. The next day Pontius Pilate, greatly pleased at the capture of the wily zealot chieftain, had ordered Cornelius to take his century and scour the rocks above the Jericho road into which the evening before the marauders had disappeared. He had commanded the centurion to ferret out every member of Bar Abbas’ band and either capture or kill him. “And follow them as far as Galilee if need be, Centurion,” the Procurator had instructed him. “Capture any you can, and bring them back here; we will crucify them during the Passover festival, and for the thousands of rebellious, stubborn Jews who will see them dying on the crosses it will be a salutary lesson. It may help them realize what fate awaits those who thus oppose Rome’s authority and power.”

Longinus wondered what success Cornelius was having. Evidently he had been forced to pursue the fleeing revolutionaries a long way, perhaps even as far as Galilee, where they might expect to find haven among kinsmen and friends. No doubt the attackers of the Tetrarch’s party had separated in their flight from the soldiers of Cornelius. It would be particularly difficult, virtually impossible, in fact, to round up all the revolutionaries Bar Abbas had been leading, Longinus felt. In all probability, he reasoned, a number of them had slipped into Jerusalem a few minutes after Cornelius had entered the city, perhaps even ahead of his caravan, and were now safely lost among the tens of thousands deluging the ancient capital.

Nor had Longinus had an opportunity thus far to spend any considerable time alone with Claudia. Though Pilate had been keeping close to his headquarters in the fortress during the day-time, he had been returning to the palace at night, and his bedchamber was beside Claudia’s and connected with it by a doorway. The Procurator, too, had issued orders for all officers not on active duty to be quickly available; Pilate seemed unusually restive. Longinus felt that Pilate was determined to prevent any small turmoil among the Jews from developing into a crisis whose handling by him might further jeopardize his standing with the Prefect Sejanus and the Emperor. With so many Jews congregated in Israel’s holy city on a festival occasion so characteristically Jewish and one that so emphasized the peculiarly nationalistic spirit of the Jews, the situation was always highly inflammable. A small spark, if not snuffed quickly, could blaze into a holocaust.

One such minor incident that had taken place on the first day of the Jewish week might have provided such a spark, had the principal actor in it been of a mind to cause trouble. And, strangely, without having known what he was seeing, Longinus had witnessed this small happening.

He had breakfasted early with several fellow officers and had come up to his chamber this particular morning, when, to enjoy a stirring of the already warming April air, he had stepped out onto the balcony. Down below him the Court of the Gentiles was a hive of bustling activity. Out beyond the eastern wall in the direction he happened to be looking the slopes were alive with pilgrims preparing for the great festival. But up on the balcony he was safe from the stir and seething and the interminable chattering of excited Jewry, and a gentle breeze fanned him. He sat on the wide stone railing of the rampart, and idly his gaze went down the nearer slope to the Brook Kidron and along the meandering road on the other side as it climbed past Gethsemane’s olive grove toward the hill’s summit.

It was then that he noticed a procession moving slowly but with evident enthusiasm downward over this road toward the city from the direction of Bethany. Immediately his interest was attracted to the motley parade. Above the harsh cries of the hawkers in the Temple courts, the quarrelsome tones of bargaining, and the dull lowing of the cattle in the stalls awaiting sacrificing on the Great Altar, Longinus could distinguish the screamed hosannas of this unrestrained movement of dancing, singing, joyous people. Many of them were waving green branches they must have torn from trees and shrubs along the roadside. Occasionally the centurion would catch sight of an erect, tall man astride a white donkey. He adjudged the man to be tall, because his feet were not far from the gravel of the road as he sat astride the beast. And then he would lose sight of the rider as the shouting celebrants swirled about him.

Some popular rabbi with his people coming up to Jerusalem for the Passover, Longinus surmised, as he watched the writhing column approach the Brook Kidron crossing. Soon it disappeared under the walls down near Dung Gate, but presently it emerged again into his sight; he followed its progress through the cavernous alleys of Ophel, sometimes seeing it crossing a narrow opening between huddled buildings but hearing without interruption its lively shouts and chantings, until it came into clearer view at a stairway in the street pushing upward along Mount Moriah toward the Temple now resplendent in the morning sunshine.

Inside the Court of the Gentiles, which the strange little caravan of one rider and his evidently unorganized but plainly joyous adherents had reached by coming in through the Gate Shalleketh, the tall man dismounted, and someone quickly led the little animal away. In another moment the shouting and hosannas had ceased, and soon the centurion lost the rider in the press of the Temple throng.

Later that day in crossing the Court of the Gentiles to go out through the Gate Shalleketh and onto the bridge over the Tyropoeon, which was the easiest way to Mount Zion from the fortress, Longinus learned that the man on the donkey was the rabbi from Galilee. Many of his followers had expected the rabbi, whose fame by now had spread throughout Judaea, to come into the precincts of the Temple, proclaim himself Yahweh’s Messiah and the ruler of the world, and call down legions of heavenly angels utterly to destroy every vestige of Rome’s dominion. Now these followers were deeply disappointed and utterly chagrined. The tall one from Galilee in whom they had put their trust, the one who would be Israel’s new David to deliver it from its mighty enemy, had failed them.

But what if this Jesus had really fancied himself a man ordained to lead his little nation in throwing off the yoke of Rome? What, reasoned the centurion, if he had been as visionary, as passionately though unwisely patriotic as countless other Jews assembled here in Rome for Israel’s great celebration? In this tense, highly inflammable atmosphere of Passover week in Jerusalem, with great numbers of his followers believing that he possessed supernatural authority and powers, the rabbi’s willingness to allow himself to be proclaimed Israel’s king would have resulted in fearful bloodshed. But this Jesus at the last moment had either lost his courage, or else he had never contemplated leadership of Israel except in some vague, religious sense that Cornelius perhaps would term spiritual. At any rate, Longinus concluded, the Galilean was no threat to Rome and of no concern to the Empire. In his report to Sejanus, he would make no mention of the rabbi, unless in some manner Pontius Pilate might become involved with the man from Galilee. He wondered if Pilate had even been informed of the little procession that had come to such an inglorious ending within the Temple court. He wondered if Pilate, in fact, in his harried administration of the affairs of Judaea had ever heard of this Jesus.